“Kleine wendige Truppen” Dead Drop installation and lecture at Brecht Haus Berlin. Curated by Cornelius Puschke.

Art and economics have entertained a complex and decisive relationship since ancient times. But for over a century, what is at stake goes far beyond the mere art market: what we face now is the commodification of all that is visible.

The photographs, drawings, paintings, videos, films, digital works and multimedia installations selected for this exhibition explore the raw materials that go into creating these images, the enormous reserves and databases they accumulate in, the human (or non-human) toil involved in their creation, and the fluctuations in their value as they circulate around the world.
The exhibition offers a critical take and unexpected perspectives on the making of the great image market that structures our gaze.

We live in a world that is increasingly saturated with images. Their number is growing so exponentially – on social networks and on screens of all kinds – that the space in which we live is literally overflowing with images, as if it were no longer possible to contain them, as if there were no more gaps between them. (We could be said to be approaching the limit which, as long ago as 1929, Walter Benjamin described as “a one hundred percent image space”.) Faced with this overabundance and overproduction of images, the question of storing them, managing them, circulating them and transporting them (even electronically), their weight, the fluidity or viscosity of their exchange, fluctuations in their values – in short, the whole business of the image economy – is more pertinent now than ever before. In the book that provided the starting point for this exhibition project (Le Supermarché du visible, published by Éditions de Minuit in 2017), I suggested the word iconomie (“iconomics”) to refer to the economic dimension in the life of images.

The works and artists chosen for the exhibition cast a keen and watchful eye over these issues. On the one hand, they reflect the upheavals that currently affect economics in general, whether in terms of unprecedentedly large storage spaces, scarce raw materials, labour and its mutations towards immaterial forms of work, or in terms of value and its new manifestations, such as cryptocurrencies. At the same time, however, these artists’ works repeatedly interrogate the future of images and things visible in the age of their globalised iconomics.

In the supermarket on display here, images of the economy always involve the economics of the image. And vice versa, as if there were a recto and a verso to all of them.

Curators : Peter Szendy, Emmanuel Alloa and Marta Ponsa
Exhibition organised by the Jeu de Paume

The main exhibition SCREEN IT takes place on the Corda Campus, currently one of the fast growing tech incubators in Europe. But also the former basecamp of Philips where technologic innovations as audio and videocassettes or Laservision were invented that help spreading the western visual culture over the world. The dominance of this culture, linked to the omnipresence of screens is the starting point of the exhibition. Artist as Nam June Paik or Wolf Vostell already tackled the possibilities of screens in art and culture in the ’60. Paik’s famous quote “Television tortured the intellectuals for a long time… it is about time that the intellectuals torture television” clearly presents this generation ambiguous positions towards screens. This approach can easily be transferred towards our current society filled with buzz words as big data, social media, VR or augmented reality. The exhibition thus will tackle the current status of the arts towards the cultural impact of the screen fueled culture we live in.

Sometimes as a source of inspiration, as a canvas or as starting point for debate, the current and future generation of artists is touching the limits of technology or the impact on contemporary art esthetics, news gathering, politics, social commitment and more. The generation of digital natives, born with their fingers clued on a screen, is investigating a world with or without screens, questioning virtual worlds and augmented realities in an intriguing way.
Artists (22)
Nam June Paik
Hito Steyerl
Rodney Graham
Mounir Fatmi
Wolf Vostell
Bill Viola
Cory Arcangel
Aram Bartholl
Constant Dullaart
Jonas Lund
Tabor Robak
Tabita Rezaire
Rafaël Rozendaal
Carla Gannis
Émilie Brout & Maxime Marion
Karl Philips
Dries de Poorter
Arvida Byström
Molly Soda
Jeroen Van Loon
Olga Fedorova
Tom Galle

The highly anticipated second Coventry Biennial will unfold across the city from the 4th October to the 24th November 2019 and we invite people to learn, look, make, talk, think and walk with us.

The biennial’s title this year is The Twin and it comprises a series of exhibitions, events and activities about relationships.

We are an international city; Coventry and Volgograd, Russia, were the first modern twin cities in the world and this year marks the 75th anniversary of that historic bond of friendship.

The core programme of The Twin will unfold across the city in medieval and modernist buildings as well as in artist studios, galleries and museums. We will be exhibiting new and existing artworks by individual artists, duos and groups from Coventry, across the UK and from many of our international twin cities as well as other international locations. We are delighted to be exhibiting the artists listed below and will be announcing a small number of additional practitioners over the coming weeks and months:

Isobel Adderley & Jazz Moreton, Tully Arnot, Art & Language, Jonny Bark, Aram Bartholl, Jordan Baseman, James Birkin, Simon & Tom Bloor, James Bridle, Lorsen Camps, Paul Chan & Badlands Unlimited, David Cheeseman, James Clarkson, Anna Columbine, Maud Cotter, Paul Crook, Matthew Darbyshire, Joseph DeLappe, Lisa Denyer, Jacqueline Donachie, Caitriona Dunnett, EVOL, Anne Forgan, Dylan Fox, Darryl Georgiou & Rebekah Tolley, Zuza Golinska, Noémie Goudal, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Mona Hatoum, Corey Hayman, Nicky Hirst, Clare Holdstock, Fred Hubble, Andrew Jackson, Juneau Projects, Navi Kaur, Smirna Kulenović, Liz Lake, Ollie Ma, Ioana Marinescu, Tony McClure, Lorna Mills, Anna Molska, MTAA, Alexandra Muller, Edie Jo Murray, Uriel Orlow, OUTLINE & Smirna Kulenović, Paper Rad, Bharti Parmar, Parmar & Piper, Partisan Social Club, Mathew Parkin, Matthew Picton, Duncan Poulton, Adele Mary Reed, Lis Rhodes, Rafaël Rozendaal, Ana Rutter, Richard Scott, Shirana Shahbazi, Larissa Shaw, Thomson & Craighead, Leonid Toprover, Chidera Ugada, Mhairi Vari, Nilupa Yasmin